Beyond Employability: From Aspiration to Agency- Five Interconnected Forms of Youth Agency for Economic Participation and Future-Making

Introduction – The Problem

Young people globally are coming of age during a period of extraordinary access and extraordinary uncertainty. Education, digital connectivity, and artificial intelligence are expanding access to knowledge, networks, markets, and possible futures. At the same time, young people face economic insecurity, climate disruption, political instability, conflict, rapidly changing labor markets, and increasingly polarized digital environments.

The economic contradiction is particularly significant. The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that, despite global youth unemployment reaching a 15-year low in 2023, 20 percent of young people remained outside employment, education, or training. Educational attainment has increased, yet appropriate employment has not kept pace, contributing to persistent mismatches between education and work and continuing anxiety among young people about employment and financial independence (ILO, 2024).

Young people can therefore see more possibilities while remaining uncertain about how to reach them. This creates a widening tension between aspiration and opportunity and raises a larger educational question: Are we preparing young people primarily to compete for opportunities within the world as it exists, or developing their capacity to participate in constructing their own economic futures?

The Hypothetical Solution – From Skills to Agency

This paper proposes moving beyond fragmented employability interventions toward the development of interconnected forms of agency.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) provides an important foundation. Social-emotional capabilities are associated with wellbeing, educational achievement, career preparedness, and employment-related outcomes (OECD, 2024). Yet SEL should not simply teach young people to regulate themselves within difficult circumstances. Resilience without credible pathways toward opportunity risks teaching young people to tolerate insecurity rather than transform it.

The paper's conceptual contribution is a Five Interconnected Forms of Youth Agency framework in which emotional, social, digital, economic, and future agency operate as mutually reinforcing capabilities connecting SEL with economic participation and collective action. Emotional agency encompasses self-awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, perseverance, and self-efficacy. Social agency includes belonging, communication, cooperation, leadership, constructive disagreement, deliberation, and the capacity to build with others. Digital agency moves beyond connectivity toward critical and purposeful use of digital technologies and AI. Economic agency encompasses skills and education, financial capability, entrepreneurship, opportunity recognition, problem-solving, value creation, and resource mobilization. Future agency is the capacity to transform aspiration into awareness, goals, pathways, action, and adaptation.

The five dimensions are interconnected rather than sequential. The hypothesis is that youth economic development becomes more effective when these capabilities are intentionally developed together.

A Crisis of Aspiration and Opportunity

Young people do not experience unemployment, climate uncertainty, political instability, technological disruption, social polarization, and economic insecurity as separate policy sectors. They experience them simultaneously as part of everyday life. Research with young people similarly identifies an interacting environment of geopolitical conflict, climate and ecological crises, economic uncertainty, and information overload (UNICEF, 2025).

Digital environments intensify both possibilities and pressures. Young people have unprecedented opportunities to communicate, learn, organize, and create, while simultaneously navigating misinformation, social comparison, algorithmically amplified polarization, and outrage-driven engagement. Young people require the capacity to evaluate information, engage constructively across differences.

Nor is employability alone sufficient. Agency is not simply the capacity to adapt successfully to the world as it exists; it is the capacity to participate in changing it.

From Football to Agency

Bridge of Hope (BOH) provides an applied setting for developing and investigating this proposition. Across East Africa, encompassing various context-specific challenges, approximately 200 community football clubs currently provide spaces for sport, mentorship, Art for Peace campaigns, digital literacy, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, community engagement, and climate-resilience activities or green businesses.

Football and the value chains around it creates a trusted entry point through belonging. Young people repeatedly experience cooperation, competition, leadership, rules, disagreement, frustration, failure, perseverance, and collective responsibility. These lived experiences provide opportunities to develop emotional and social agency. Digital literacy can strengthen digital agency; financial literacy and entrepreneurship can strengthen economic agency; and mentorship, goal-setting, and opportunity pathways can strengthen future agency.

The model then extends from individual to collective agency. Through community conversations and collaborative projects, young people can practice listening across differences, deliberating, identifying shared problems, recognizing community assets, mobilizing local knowledge and resources, and building solutions together. External partnerships remain important but can serve as multipliers of locally generated capability rather than substitutes for it.

WISE-ED is now formalizing and expanding this community system through iterative design thinking informed by monitoring, evaluation, youth experience, and community feedback. The research uses a mixed-methods approach combining program monitoring data with youth agency measures, focus groups and community conversations, and qualitative observation across participating clubs. Iterative cycles identify how components operate in different contexts and use findings to refine subsequent implementation. Rather than evaluating a fixed intervention only after delivery, research and implementation become part of a continuous cycle of design, participation, evidence, reflection, adaptation, and redesign.

Emerging Lessons – From Participation to Future-Making

Practice to date generates several propositions for systematic investigation. First, belonging can precede learning: trusted community institutions can create conditions for meaningful participation. Second, agency develops through practice; leadership, disagreement, failure, cooperation, financial decisions, and problem-solving must be experienced rather than merely explained. Third, access is not agency: technology, information, and financial knowledge become transformative when young people can use them purposefully.

Most importantly, individual agency may become collective capacity. Young people can learn to ask “What knowledge, capabilities, relationships, and resources already exist among us, and what can we build together?”

From Aspiration to Agency

The Five Interconnected Forms of Youth Agency framework reframes youth not primarily as recipients of interventions or future workers awaiting integration into existing economies, but as present actors capable of creating value, mobilizing resources, deliberating across difference, and participating collectively in future-making.

The proposition is not that agency can substitute for structural investment or economic opportunity. Rather, capability and opportunity must develop together. Education can help young people navigate uncertainty while strengthening their capacity to act upon the conditions around them.

Education should not merely prepare young people for the future. It should develop their agency to participate, with others, in making it.